Christmas came and went, New Year flew past with a bang but PC Pro’s reviews kept on coming. We’ve much catching up to do with this week’s round-up, so we’ll keep the focus on the most notable of the twenty-plus reviews since the festive period.

New Year’s entertainment

We got unfeasibly possessive over a little media player in the Labs, thanks to the fabulous AMOLED screen on Cowon’s S9. It shared so many strengths with the iPod Touch, but with its individually lit pixels – no backlight required – it breathed new life into those iPlayer programmes we’d saved over Christmas. A truly stunning screen and a very nice little device.

On the subject of screens, the oddly named Village Tronic ViBook arrived to extend the life of our old office TFTs. It attaches to the back and converts any display to work over DisplayLink – essentially USB – to run multiple monitors without the need for multiple video outputs. Will 2009 be the year of DisplayLink?

Nvidia continued its strategy of releasing superpowered graphics cards with the mighty GeForce GTX 295. With two chips on one board it’s lighting fast at the latest games, but are there really enough people out there willing to pay £400 for a graphics card?

Reviews editor Jon Bray is adamant that pocket “YouTube video cameras” will storm the market in 2009, and Kodak launched its entry, the Zi6. It didn’t exactly blow us away though, with poor colour accuracy and a bulk that puts it in significantly larger pockets than others we’ve previously been impressed by.

Systems for 2009

If the news of Sony’s not-a-netbook netbook didn’t excite you this week, we had Lenovo’s ThinkPad SL500 and IdeaPad S10e as more usable alternatives. The former is a supremely solid 15.4in small-business laptop with more than enough going for it to earn a Recommended award; the latter is Lenovo’s belated entry into the netbook market – with mixed results.

In the PC realm, Chillblast’s Fusion Gemini continued the manufacturer’s good run of success with gaming PCs, while Logitech’s G13 Advanced Gameboard might make a good companion for those serious enough to spend nearly £50 in the pursuit of gaming excellence.

Christmas business

On the more serious side of the industry, the most interesting arrival was the Imation Pro 7000 64GB, an SSD costing nearly £600 – we reckon it’s only a matter of time before they become the norm in servers, which will pave the way for consumer take-up too. 

Elsewhere we saw the Thecus N4100PRO business NAS device, with support for RAID-6 dual redundant arrays plus mirrored stripes, and the D-Link DNS-34Li3 RAID5 alternative. Servers from NEC and Lenovo completed a busy week.